Cell Phone

Why did I get a cell phone? It was a conscious decision of mine 5 years ago. I dont know why though. One day I rode my bike to the t mobile store and gave them a bunch of money. Maybe I just wanted friends. In the long run, I don't think it helped.

Allegory of the Cave

Between the third and final escalator on the way to work, I used to find my shadow. I would imagine that he was someone else. Someone else strapped into this job - not me. I was above him, observing. In many ways, my life has improved since those days. I might have some kind of direction, a little bit of purpose. In other ways I am much more like the shadow then I was before, completely disconnected.

I was sitting in a subway car in New York City. This wasn't real new york, because the the subway car was sparkling white with blue trim; the clean was pristine. I was sitting on the blue seat and I was looking through the plexiglass when something next to me caught my eye. It was a worn, orange backpack, the contents of which were spilling out onto the bench. On the top of the pile was something that looked like an ID card. I examined this more closely. It was some kind of libertarian driver's license that proclaimed that the holder was fit to drive and didn't need the help of the government to prove it. The name and the face on the card matched my friend, Graham. I resolved to take the backpack and its contents in order to return them to my friend. I would have to be sneaky because I was worried that I would look like I was stealing the backpack. I placed the orange backpack inside my navy one and ran off the train.

I flew out of the station. Ran down winding corridors of stone. I was unsure if I was being perused or not. In the interest of caution I acted as though I was. I finally came to an opening to the outside. There were no doors, just an opening in the stone to rain and mist. I appeared to be on the side of a building, though I could only see about one story above and below. The rain seemed to fall from an upper cloud and pass my face on its way to the lower. I thought that it would be cool if the rain didn't hit the ground but somehow re-mingled with the aerosolised water that made up the cloud above the street. I imagined that the people below were walking through a mist; I hoped this was true. I was being rained on but I didn't seem to care. I moved down the ledge on the outside of the building a bit, took a seat and removed Graham's backpack from my own.

"What are you doing?" The girl was smiling as she ate a sandwich under her umbrella. She seemed like a pleasant sort of person, the kind that wasn't terribly concerned that they were on a ledge on the outside of a building in the rain. She was wearing red sneakers. I told her that I had happened upon my estranged friend's pack and I was going to search inside to see if there was anything with his address on it in order to return it to him. She offered to take the bag to Graham, as he was her neighbor and it would be no trouble at all. I let her, because I trusted her, also I was having a lucid dream and I wast tired of dealing with the backpack.

The city of New York was a caricature of pictures I have seen, overly simplified and sterile. Once the girl had finished her sandwich and left with Graham's pack, the upper clouds began to lift and I could see higher up my building and some of the surrounding ones. They were all grey stone, with widely spaced windows. I knew I didn't live in new york, nothing was right here, there wasn't any odd detail poking out of the fog. It was a shell of an idea. Were I actually lived was another mystery. I tunneled in an out of this idea as I shifted in and out of sleep. Even a few minutes after I was finally awake all I was sure of was that I wasn't in new york.

Yesterday I Realized

I was at a job interview and was being told that the job had full medical, dental, etc. I considered that this was a legit, grownup job and was immediately disconnected from the idea of actually having it. I don't know what I would do if I were to be offered the job. I think I like being a bit of a underemployed, financially challenged, failure. Anything is possible when the only way to go is up.

Driving

The other day I was driving the drive between Saint Paul and Wisconsin. It was night and I was wondering why I wasn't terrified out of my mind. Then I remembered.

I used to be insanely scared of driving. The idea of steering a ton of steel at tremendous speed was not an appealing one. Not only do you have to worry about your own actions, but the actions of others (also piloting their own hunks of metal) and random chance can trigger catastrophe moments notice. The forces generated by moving objects at that speed are enough to turn what used to be a person into many distinct, widely separated fragments. While I was learning to drive, I would emerge from each driving session with my shirt soaked through with nervous sweat.

The only way I managed to accept driving as any kind of a routine activity, was to confront my own mortality. I had to get in the car and think to myself, "I may die, but I guess that's okay." To be honest, I don't think I dealt with it in a particularly healthy way. I harnessed the power of slight depression and borderline recklessness. I was only able to cope with driving because at some level I was okay with dying. This is not how I imagine most people are able to drive. I imagine that most people are able to drive because they don't really think about the consequences of driving that much, or that they rationalize away the risk because they perceive it as small. The way that I imagine most people cope with driving seems healthier.

I remembered that I wasn't terrified out of my mind because, as I rounded the S curves, it was kind of okay if I died. Here I am, an ant in the colossal scheme of things and I find it hilarious. We build massive cities and vast networks of roads. It is fucking amazing, the amount of control we have exerted over our environment. Even if the kid in the next lane decides to bend over to pick up his cellphone and careens into me and I fly out my front window and end up in seventeen different pieces and none of those pieces are very good to look at. Even then, what a ride.

Want

I want to lay face down on the grass.
I want to stop having miniature panic attacks.
I want to be financially comfortable.
I do not want to be rich.
I want to travel on a regular basis.
I want to ride the subway all day long.
I want to ride my bike all day long.
I want to fill the streets with sod and the lawns with prairie.
I want to speak all languages.
I want to have seven percent body fat.
I want to learn about something new every day.
I want to live in the city, on the top floor of an apartment building.
I want to live in the mountains by the ocean.
I want to have perfect pitch and a photographic memory.
I want to sleep in a hammock with a book on my face.
I want to touch sea anemones.
I want to make my own sourdough bread.
I do not want to go shopping.
I want an interesting job that takes four to seven hours a day.
I want to understand everyone.
I want to throw a party at which the guests dance until the morning sun rises up over the grocery store.
I want to dig for freedom.
I want to stay up all night in the back seat of a car, watching water drops inch their way past my eyes.
I want to break it down into its component parts, then reassemble them in a variety of ways.
I want to go sailing.
I want a glass of milk.

Bike Ride

The smell is the dry, dusty, sharp kind that hangs about under stands of red pines. It is localized. Just faintly reaching the trail when the stands are close enough for it to compete against the manure and river water and sunflowers. The sap must be boiling. Half a mile distant, the temperature gradient of the rising air causes undulations in light rays. The asphalt appears to be flowing. The sap fades abruptly and I am surrounded by a floral nectar. A rolling green and yellow.

This whole thing is nice because it unplugs my mind from the constant and rapidly changing stimulation it usually receives during leisure time. It is halfway between reflection and meditation, free flowing and cathartic. Alternating between issues, which eventually need to be addressed and transient concerns. A smell is not sharp. That has no meaning.

Found

I've been going through my things, packing for the move. I found an external hard drive with some photos I had taken on my trip to London. Here is a selection.

I had a dream that I was a different person. Also, I ate my brain with a spoon. I didn't want to eat too much of it, but it tasted so good it was hard to stop. I remember feeling lucky that I managed to abstain from my cerebellum and brain stem.

Sorry

Stolen from Kate Beaton:

"Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view."

Part IV

In the years after I was told that we were not able to return my brother, I made several attempts to take him out of the picture using slightly more fratricidal methods. One of these dramatic scenes took place at a departmental picnic my family was attending. The adults were eating and having conversation around a couple of picnic tables. A short distance away, a few baby-grub things, including my brother, were crawling around in the grass. I was standing by myself, in awe of one of the most awesome objects I had ever laid eyes on.

It was a green and yellow tractor. I believe it was used as a maintenance vehicle for the institute. The tractor was well worn and had body rust, but was definitely in fair working condition. Larger than a lawn tractor, but smaller than your standard farm tractor, it was one of the more impressive tractors I had ever seen this close up. It was also unattended.

It was an open invitation, and I accepted it. I was positively delighted to be sitting in the tractor seat, bouncing up and down and gripping the steering wheel. What's more, none of the adults seemed to notice or care. I was having a ball. Then I glimpsed the Best Thing.

The key was in the ignition. At two years old, I knew about some important things. One of these things was that if you wanted to make a car (or a tractor) go, you needed to turn the key. This was probably on of the better moments in my life up to this point (especially considering that many of the other moments in my life involved trying to fit myself into my duplo barn; these were not good moments). I leaned forward, one hand on the steering wheel, and grasped the key.

The tractor had been left in gear, when I turned the key it immediately started rolling forward. Nice. I was moving forward at around two miles per hour, maybe about half as fast as walking speed. Directly in from of me, probably ten feet away, grub-brother was drooling on the grass. This was my chance. Ramming speed! my beautiful tractor.

Unfortunately for my plans, my mother noticed this chain of events almost immediately after I turned the key. She let out a scream, dashed towards the grubblet and scooped him up, out of harm's way.

Foiled.

WHAT THE FUCK, WHAT THE FUCK?!??!?!?!

Flash Mobs

I am

Running down an escalator. Not so much running, as a controlled fall; my heels strike the edges of the steps just hard enough to propel me forward to continue my descent. I am listening to Superheros by Daft Punk on my headphones. Pew pew pew pew pew.

Sitting in the crawlspace under my house in Missouri. It is dark and wet and salamanders slide between the pools of water that have accumulated in the thick clay soil. I am devising plans for my escape back to Toronto. I carefully diagram each plan with a green coloured pencil in my spiral notebook. None of these plans are viable; I lack an adequate understanding of physics, or perhaps, am engaging in a little too much wishful thinking.

Skating in circles, alone on the rink. Reading a book in the softball sand in the setting sun. Studying for my AP exams in a concession stand on the edge of an abandoned but well lit football field. Attempting to float while the vacuum robot churns happily away on the bottom of the city pool.

Sitting on a bench in a metro station, feeling just as comfortable as I ever have in my own room. My walls, my floor, my trains.

Using a small stick to poke a hole in a bag of grass seed, which a man is trying to sell to my mother. A month later there is a bright strip of newly sprouted grass down the middle of our, otherwise barren, Urbana lawn.

Lying, limp, in a snow drift. Giant snowflakes are streaking across my field of vision; illuminated in amber streetlights set against a pink, city-glow, sky. I am drun, and think I am warm because of it. I resolve to skip my classes, which turn out to be canceled anyway.

Standing on a rock surrounded by cold spring-morning water. I woke up early with another boy at the retreat. We are looking upstream at the rays of the early sun catching on the spray of a small waterfall before reflecting in infinite directions on the rapids below.

Running up an escalator. The arches of my feet touch the edge of the steps so my heels hang free. I can see blue light in a narrow ellipse above. I am listening to Face to Face by Daft Punk on my headphones. Dun dundund dun dun.

I am on the internet

I need to go to bed.

Spring Cleaning

I've long had an internal superstition. Whenever I randomly recall something, I am terrified that I am only remembering it because my brain has decided to delete it. I concentrate as hard as I can to commit that thought back into my memory in order to hold on to it. I have no idea if I am successful or not. When I think back, I can never remember what it was that I was trying not to remember for the last time.

It could be a random fact, a place of beauty, an inside jokes, the smell of dust settling through a ray of sun. Are they gone? Am I basing myself off of a foundation that no longer remains?

Brapadap

I've taken to using two tea bags per cup of tea. This is a slipper slope, an incredibly satisfying slippery slope.

Now that it is warmer out I wake up to a new life every morning. It's the same feeling as waking up for the last day of school.

I'm pretty sure that everybody in this town was hibernating too.

This video makes me want to have children.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSjRRswSEgE&feature=related

My apartment is the third to middle ice cube on the bottom ice cube tray in a stack of ice cube trays. Looking through it, it is apparently transparent.

There are faint ghosts of childhood.

Automatic

Today:

Self checkout
Smartrip
Museum
Museum
Smartrip

I haven't spoken a word out loud to anyone.

Incomplete

This backup project will ultimately fall short. I owe it to try.
It has an interesting effect on me. I'm not really living in the present anymore so it makes it hard to pick out the details that will matter.

Impressions

The semi-constant theme of my daydreams has been the mind and consciousness, or the lack there of. To accept that we are tied to these physical bodies forces me to concluded that we are dying every second of every day as whatever it is that makes us "ourselves" gets replaced by something new. This is a satisfying, if somewhat depressing, conclusion.

(Here is where I venture somewhere slightly absurd.)

How about if we think of ourselves as something altogether different from a capsule inside our skulls. Let us take the uncertainty of our physical boundaries to an extreme. In this case a person's personality is a finely woven set of memories and tendencies. In my fantasies a BCI would allow for this fabric to transcribed and replicated elsewhere. But what if this is happening to a certain extent already?

When you meet somebody on the street, a little corner of their fabric brushes up against you and makes an imprint. A nervous tick, an obscure analogy. We save these little impressions up for later use in our own patchwork quilt. Know someone long enough and the patch grows bigger.

In this sense every bit of your fabric that you share with others is backed up for later use on the cloud. When you are gone its still there. You can't be erased without erasing everyone you've interacted with.

Edit: I think what I was trying to get at here but may have ineffectively conveyed is the idea that because our individuality is nothing more than our combined experiences and memories then there are not really any rules that confine it to our body and transfer is already happening.

Part III

Part of the reason that my parents hadn't initially known how often I had been going over to Oma's, was that from a very early age I did what I wanted and did not see any need to tell anyone about it. Also my room was outfitted with some sweet sliding glass windows so I could pretty much come and go as I pleased. And now some unorganized but memorable thoughts from this time period:

Oma had a teenage daughter who babysat me sometimes. She was not quite as fun as Oma but she was still nice. She is now married with a son of her own (much to Oma's delight).

My neighbors on the other side of our house had a dog named stazi who was small and brown and happy and ran in circles most of the time.

Beyond their house there was a boy who was just a little bit older than I was. I used to play with him sometimes, but not that often because his parents didn't really like foreigners, I think. I don't remember his name but he had dark hair and was ever so slightly mean to me. The thing was: he had a tractor. This tractor was The Shit. I could have driven that petal-powered-motherfucker all day long. It was large (relative to a 3 year old boy) and had a functional shovel attached to the front, which was controlled by two levers that allowed for some serious digging and dumping action. Man, I loved that tractor.

My first word was "Traktor", that's the German word for tractor. I loved tractors and all other types of construction equipment (der Kipper, der Bagger, der Kran). When there was a construction site in the area my dad would take me there so I could watch. For my second birthday my mom took me to a tractor convention in a nearby town. It is a fairly normal thing for little boys to think construction equipment is awesome. I don't know if its all that normal for little boys use it for attempted manslaughter.

Translation

Those who are not tech literate have their own (fairly consistent) language when refering to technology. Some examples:

UBS's = USB Cables
USB's = USB Flash Memory Storage Devices
Notebook, Nettop = Netbook
Windows = Microsoft Office
Hard Drive = Desktop Computer
Computer = Monitor
The Internet = a Wireless Router
Dellstar = the Ultimate Notebook

In addition, RAM and hard drive capacity are the same thing (if you have enough, quote the higher number; if you want more, quote the lower). Video cards increase the quality of any DVD's you may watch on your computer.

The best way to respond to this type of language is not to correct it, and better yet, to adopt it if someone you are speaking with uses it. Any sign that you think that they are using a term incorrectly will be interpreted as a personal assault on their intelligence.

Part II

This is still very much out of order and possibly incorrect, as it is on the beginning edge of my memories.

I was still living in the house with the strawberry patch when Anthony first made an appearance in my life. At slightly less than two years old, I don't think I comprehended how seriously shitty a new baby was going to be until after my brother was born. The new grub demanded almost all of my parents' attention. Ever the pragmatist, I told them that we should should just take Anthony back to the hospital (that's where he came from, after all). They responded that no, they couldn't take him back.

"Don't worry, I know how to get there," I assured them.

With my parents spending all their time on larva #2, I found a new person to dote on me and give me affection. I referred to the wonderful woman next door as "meine Oma". I don't think I can remember her real name but that woman treated me as if I was her own grandson. It was great. Most days, I would wander over to her house and she would pick me up, set me on the counter and fed me. She fed me weisswurst, quark, kucken, ovalmaltine and all sorts of wonderful Bavarian food. The upshot of this was that I was rarely hungry when it was time to eat at my own house.

My parents were worried enough by this that they took me to a doctor, who, after testing my blood, found that I had several nutritional deficiencies. When the root of the problem was finally found, Oma was asked to please not give me so many sweets and maybe some fruit once and a while. Even after this whole ordeal, I was pretty much ruined by Bavarian food. On the rare occasions that I wasn't already full from a trip to Oma's house, I would turn my nose up at a meal and proclaim that "das ist greislich". It took a colloquial Bavarian to German dictionary for my parents to find out that greislich means disgusting.

Gone Forever

Somewhere between there and here I have amazing and beautiful thoughts. As a rule, I do not write them down.